It is a point that deserves more attention than it has received that both James and Charles came to believe that the difficulties they experienced with their parliaments were attributable, in some degree, to the composition of the House of Commons. In the aftermath of the disastrous Addled Parliament the attorney-general, Sir Francis Bacon, encouraged James to believe that if only the Commons were rightly composed it would be ‘a sufficient House, worthy to consult within the great causes of the commonwealth’.
The composition of the Commons is among the more neglected aspects of early Stuart parliamentary history, as few scholars have examined this complex subject.
Friends and strangers, veterans and novices
The early modern House of Commons was so large that it would have been extraordinary if many of those who entered the chamber for the first time did not know at least some of their fellow Members. When a man sat at Westminster he joined a vast throng of strangers, to be sure, but unless he was remarkably obscure he was also likely to encounter many of his friends, neighbours and relations. On entering the Commons for the first and only time in 1604, Nicholas Steward of Taplow, in Buckinghamshire, would have been familiar not only to the handful of fellow civil lawyers with seats in the House but also to the two Members for Guildford, Sir George More and George Austen, both of whom were his former neighbours in Surrey and godfathers to one of his sons. In 1614 the former soldier Sir William Lovelace and the king’s carver Sir Walter Chute both made their parliamentary debuts. Though Lovelace sat for the Kent city of Canterbury and Chute for the Nottinghamshire borough of East Retford each was certainly known to the other, as they served on the same county bench and both lived at Bethersden, in Kent. More than one father and son had overlapping parliamentary careers, and it was not at all unusual for brothers to sit simultaneously: Sir Thomas Hoby and his elder sibling Sir Edward sat in five of the same parliaments, and in 1624 four of the sons of the 4th Lord St. John had seats in the Commons. One of the best-connected Members of the early Stuart House was Sir Henry Neville of Billingbear, Berkshire, whose kinsmen included several of the most prominent parliamentary figures of his day, among them William Hakewill, Sir Maurice Berkeley and Sir Robert Killigrew. So extensive were Neville’s parliamentary connections that they undoubtedly lent credibility to his offer, made to James in 1612, to manage a Parliament on the king’s behalf.
In any Parliament men of all ages rubbed shoulders. Even though only those who had attained their majority were deemed capable of election, there were, as we have seen, always a few under-age individuals in the chamber. Most of these minors were aged between eighteen and twenty, but a few were considerably younger: Sir William Pulteney was sixteen when he entered the chamber for the first time in 1601, and James, Lord Wriothesley and Sir Peregrine Bertie were just fifteen when they made their parliamentary debuts in 1621 and 1624 respectively. There were no upper age limits put on membership, and provided he was in moderately good health a man could not be forced to step down by reason of old age, as Great Yarmouth’s corporation evidently discovered when it tried to persuade John Wheeler to surrender his seat in December 1610.
Just as the ages of those who sat varied widely, so too did the parliamentary experience which they brought to the Commons. In every assembly there was a solid core of veterans to balance against the inevitable influx of newcomers. For instance, while 191 (or 41%) of the 468 men returned at the 1604 general election were new to the chamber, 144 of them (30%) had previously sat in two or more parliaments. Nevertheless, it sometimes seemed that the House was being overrun by new and inexperienced Members. Writing to England’s ambassador to Brussels at the start of the 1624 Parliament, Sir George Chaworth, then in his mid fifties, declared that many of his parliamentary colleagues were mere ‘boys’, and that the Commons contained ‘many young and new men never of any Parliament before’.
Chaworth was not alone in suggesting that there were too many callow youths in the Commons. In the aftermath of the Addled Parliament Sir Francis Bacon claimed that James’s second Parliament had been poisoned by the reckless behaviour of an abnormally large number of young, inexperienced Members. ‘Three parts of the House were such as had never been of any former Parliament’, he complained, ‘and many of them young men and not of any great estate or quality’. Experienced former Members had chosen not to stand, leaving the field wide open for men with little or no experience to take their place. To those who thought that the king stood to benefit from a House full of young men as ‘such men will give most because they have least’, Bacon retorted that they were ‘wonderfully mistaken ... for such are ever more forward to deny and oppose upon bravery than the gentlemen of the country or wealthy merchants’. Besides, a House populated with too many inexperienced young men undermined the gravity of the chamber, mere striplings being inclined to turn serious matters of state ‘into a kind of sport or exercise’.
Although Bacon was himself a Member of the 1614 Parliament, the impression he conveyed of a Commons dominated by inexperienced newcomers was seriously misleading. It is of course true that a high percentage of novices sat in 1614, a consequence perhaps of the great length of the first Jacobean Parliament, many of whose Members may have been reluctant to commit themselves to another meeting that, for all they knew, might last just as long.
It was also misleading for Bacon to suggest that a majority of the novices elected in 1614 were landless young men. Although the ages of a handful cannot now be ascertained, only about a third of the newcomers (eighty-eight or eighty-nine in total) were under the age of thirty. Of these, admittedly, a majority had either not inherited their father’s estates or were younger sons and therefore not likely to succeed. Nevertheless only about sixty-four individuals actually fit Bacon’s profile of landless young men with no former parliamentary experience. These represented just a quarter of the novice Members that year, and less than fourteen per cent of the House’s entire membership. Bacon would have been on far safer ground had he noticed the correlation between novice Members and the number of Members without office.
Bacon’s suggestion that the novices in the chamber made the House more than usually difficult to manage are also hard to substantiate. Several Members made inflammatory or provocative speeches during the Parliament, but only two – Walter Chute, who said that the king might repair his finances if his major officers were not so corrupt, and Sir William Walter, who stated on the final day of the Parliament that the king’s refusal to surrender impositions made them all slaves – were new to the House. Two other newcomers, the lawyers Leonard Bawtree and Thomas Hitchcock, actually stood up for the king’s right to levy impositions, while a third, John Dackombe, a former servant of the Cecils, urged his colleagues to vote subsidies to prevent the king from marrying off Prince Charles to a French princess.
There is very little evidence that the proportion of newcomers to the House had any bearing on the Crown’s ability to manage the Commons. The Parliament with the highest percentage of newcomers was that of 1621, in which around fifty-eight per cent of the Members returned at the general election (278 in total) had never sat before. However, as will be seen in chapter 13, for the first three months of its existence the 1621 Parliament was considerably more harmonious than its two immediate predecessors, both of which contained fewer novices. Perhaps the clearest evidence that there was no correlation between parliamentary inexperience and difficulty of management is provided by the first three parliaments of Charles’s reign. During these assemblies the number of newcomers to the Commons shrank to just 26% of the intake at the general elections of 1625 and 1628 and to 24% of the intake in 1626, yet all three assemblies proved very far from easy for the Crown to manage. Indeed, in 1626 a large section of the Commons actually sought to topple the king’s chief minister, the duke of Buckingham.
Officeholding
Given that they were mainly drawn from the nation’s ruling classes, most Members of the Commons held office at some time during their lives. Many, in fact, held several offices simultaneously, especially if they were well connected. A not untypical example is that of Sir Edward Hoby of Shurland House, north Kent, who served for Rochester in the first two Jacobean assemblies and was first cousin to the king’s chief minister, Robert Cecil. During the time he sat in Parliament, Hoby was a magistrate in three separate counties, held the constableship of Queenborough Castle, served as a vice admiral of the coast under the lord high admiral and was a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber.
Many of those who held office were royal officials. For some of these men, service to the king was restricted to their localities, but for others it meant employment in the Crown’s central administration or in one of the minor royal households. Most departments of state were represented in the Commons during this period, and some, like Chancery, the Exchequer and the Court of Wards, always had several senior officials in the House. In 1614 no less than five of the six principal officers in the Court of Wards had seats: the master (Sir Walter Cope); the clerk of the liveries (Sir William Cooke); the receiver-general (Sir Miles Fleetwood); the surveyor (Sir Roger Wilbraham); and the attorney (Sir James Ley). Only the clerk (John Hare) was missing. At the general election in 1624 eight officers of the Exchequer, both upper and lower, secured places in the Commons: the chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir Richard Weston); the clerk of the pells (Sir Edward Wardour); the revenue auditor (Sir Edmund Sawyer); the auditor of the receipt (Sir Robert Pye); the foreign apposer, who received the greenwax fines (William Cholmley); one of the joint surveyors of the greenwax (John Woodford); a deputy teller (William Pitt); and a clerk in the lord treasurer’s remembrancer’s office (Thomas Bancroft). In addition, two gentlemen with reversions to Exchequer posts – Sir Peter Osborne and Edward Pitt – were also elected. Osborne clearly regarded himself as an Exchequer official in waiting, for although his reversion did not fall in until 1628 he defended the department’s interests in the Commons in 1625. Towards the end of the 1624 Parliament a ninth Exchequer official – the king’s remembrancer, Thomas Fanshawe II – also gained a seat. Of course, not all government departments were as well or as regularly represented as the Court of Wards and the Exchequer. Small departments, like the Alienations Office, the Armoury or the Mint normally had just one or two officials in the House at most, and sometimes none at all.
How far individual departments sought representation for themselves in the Commons must remain a matter for speculation, but it seems likely that those which felt threatened by Parliament did so. The size of the Court of Wards’ contingent in 1614 is certainly suggestive. In 1604, and again in 1610, the possibility of abolishing wardship in return for an annual payment to the Crown had been debated by the Commons, and the officers of the court may well have decided among themselves that unless they were well represented at Westminster their interests would not be heard. Another case that also hints at some sort of collective decision is that of the College of Arms. Under Elizabeth and for most of James’s reign no officer of the College of Arms ever sat in the lower House, but this changed in 1624, when two members of the College – John Borough, the Norroy herald, and Arthur Duck, the king’s advocate – secured seats for themselves. It seems unlikely that this was mere chance, for it was in the 1624 Parliament that the Commons investigated the fees charged by the heralds.
The largest body of royal officeholders in the House, aside from the vast mass of local officials that is, were members of the king’s Household. The exact size of this cadre is hard to judge since the records pertaining to the lord steward’s and lord chamberlain’s departments are notoriously incomplete. We know, for example, that Sir William Godolphin was a gentleman of the privy chamber at his death in 1613, but we do not know whether he was also a gentleman of the privy chamber when he sat in the first Jacobean Parliament. Nevertheless, it is possible to gain a rough idea of the size of this body (for which see appendix viii) and to conclude that under James the number of Household officials in the Commons markedly declined. In 1604 between thirty-eight and forty-three Household officials entered the Commons, whereas in 1614 the number was between twenty-one and twenty-eight. That represents a fall of somewhere between a quarter and a half. During the final two parliaments of James’s reign a maximum of twenty-three or twenty-four Household officials sat in both assemblies, and perhaps as few as twenty-one.
The most likely reason for the steep decline in the number of Household officials returned to Parliament between 1604 and 1614 was a growing distrust of courtiers among the electorate, the causes of which are discussed in chapter 14. On the face of it this alteration in the composition of the House had profound implications for the king’s ability to manage the Commons. However, office in the king’s Household did not automatically predispose a man to support royal policies of which he disapproved. Sir John Holles was a gentleman of the privy chamber between 1603 and 1610, but he nevertheless opposed the Union during the first Jacobean Parliament, and in 1614 the king’s carver, Walter Chute, famously argued against the granting of subsidies. In April 1626 three Members with office in the king’s Household were suspended from their posts, apparently for supporting the motion to add poisoning the late king to the Commons’ list of charges against the duke of Buckingham.
Under Charles the number of Household officials in the Commons rose, though it did not return to the level of 1604. In 1625 there were between thirty-three and thirty-six in the chamber; in 1626 between twenty-nine and thirty-four; and in 1628 between twenty-five and twenty-seven. This sudden resurgence is difficult to explain, given that hostility among the electorate to courtiers remained pronounced throughout the 1620s. Perhaps more important than the general antipathy to courtiers was the widespread hatred of Buckingham, whose principal enemies at Court in 1625 and 1626 included the head of the Household-below-stairs, the lord chamberlain, William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke. At least six of the Household officials returned in 1626 – Thomas Carey, Sir Thomas Edmondes, Sir James Fullerton, Sir William Herbert, William Murray and Sir Francis Stewart – would also appear on any list of Pembroke’s clients for this Parliament.
Though the holding of office was unexceptional in the Commons, it was far from universal. In every Parliament up to a dozen Members seem never to have held a single position of responsibility outside the chamber.
As well as a handful of individuals who were never appointed to office, the Commons always contained a much larger number of Members who had either lost the positions they had previously held or were waiting to step into their fathers’ shoes. Precisely how many of these there were in any given Parliament is difficult to say, as the exact time of a man’s appointment or the time at which his tenure ended often remains a mystery. There is also the problem of whether to regard as officeholders all Members known to have served in the households of great men. Some of these individuals held clearly defined positions – as secretary say, or as master of the horse – but what are we to make of men like Thomas Unton and William Byng, both of whom sat in the first Jacobean Parliament and are known to us simply as servants of Henry Howard, earl of Northampton?
Despite these difficulties some broad conclusions can be reached. The first is that the number of Members without office in any given Parliament was subject to considerable fluctuation. The Parliament with the fewest such cases was that of 1604-10. Around seventy-six Members entered the Commons in 1604 without any discernible office, a figure equivalent to around sixteen per cent of the entire membership; ten more subsequently entered the Commons at by-elections. In thirteen cases some doubt exists about the Member’s status on entering the House; for instance, was Sir Thomas Darrell a magistrate at the time of his election or not? Moreover, several Members who did not hold office at the time of their election, like Sir Richard Weston, Sir Oliver St. John and Edward Musgrave, went on to obtain some sort of position before the end of the Parliament. Nevertheless it seems clear that at least eighty-five per cent of the Members of the first Jacobean Parliament at the time of their election, a figure which may have risen as the Parliament progressed.
The evidence for 1614 paints a noticeably different picture. No fewer than 115 men without office were returned at the general election, nearly a quarter of the entire intake, and two further individuals in the same boat – Roger Manwood and Sir William Selby – entered the House as a result of by-elections towards the end of the Parliament. As with the first Jacobean Parliament, several of these cases must be considered doubtful,
Over the course of the next three parliaments the number of Members without office fell well below a hundred, though the figures involved were far from negligible: between eighty and ninety Members can be counted in every case. During the final two parliaments of the period – those of 1626 and 1628/9 – the number of Members without office again rose sharply, to 116 and 120 respectively (though the precise status of nine or ten individuals must be considered doubtful). In other words, as in 1614, up to a quarter of the Members of the Commons in both parliaments lacked positions. This fraction is so much greater than the comparable figures for 1604-10 and 1621-5 that it seems unlikely it was merely the result of random fluctuations.
In the case of the 1614 Parliament the sudden influx of men without office bears a close relationship to the number of men without previous parliamentary experience elected that year. Of the 117 Members who entered the Commons without office in 1614, no less than eighty-four (72%) had never sat in Parliament before. The implication of this finding is that many of these novices were so young that they had not had time to accumulate offices. Indeed, most of the eighty-four individuals without either office or parliamentary experience in 1614 seem to have been aged thirty-five or less, and many were in their twenties.
What lay behind the sudden increase in Members without office in 1626 remains unclear and would repay detailed investigation, but it may have been a symptom of the rising opposition to Buckingham. In the case of the 1628-9 Parliament the finger of suspicion points to two likely causes, the first being the Commons’ attempt to impeach the duke in 1626, and the second being widespread resistance to the Forced Loan of 1626/7. Following these events, many leading parliamentary figures were stripped of their local offices, with the result that in 1628 several individuals –Sir Harbottle Grimston, Sir Robert Poyntz and Sir John Strangways among them – lacked office at the time of their election.
How far the absence of office influenced Members’ behaviour is difficult to say. As we have seen in a previous chapter, it might make for men who were more willing to please the king than to offend him,
Social complexion and wealth
Although drawn mainly from the ranks of the ruling elite, Members came from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds. At one end of the spectrum were men with aristocratic blood coursing through their veins. These consisted mainly of the sons and brothers of peers, many of whom held courtesy titles and would one day inherit peerages in their own right, such as Lord John Paulet, heir to the 4th marquess of Winchester, and William Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, eldest child of Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury. However they also included a couple of Irish peers – Sir John Vaughan, who obtained an Irish viscountcy midway through the 1621 Parliament and Charles, Lord Lambart, who sat in both 1626 and 1628. The size of this group naturally fluctuated from one Parliament to the next, but though it never reached thirty the inflation of honours under James and Charles certainly caused it to increase. Just sixteen sons of peers were returned at the general election of 1604, whereas in 1625 the comparable figure was twenty-eight; and two Members of the first Jacobean Parliament who were not the sons of peers at the beginning of the assembly were so before its end.
At the other end of the social scale were men of relatively humble stock, such as Richard Tisdall, the fifth son of an undistinguished London Haberdasher. A member of the lower reaches of the legal profession, Tisdall evidently owed his election for St. Germans to the 1621 Parliament not to social or political prominence but to his friendship with the bishop of Exeter’s son-in-law, John Trott. Even more obscure than Tisdall was the 1625 Canterbury Member, John Fisher. A muster-master by profession, Fisher, whose ancestry has not been established, was described by one disapproving contemporary as a ‘renowned tobacconist, swearer, scoffer, cheater and lecher’ and a man of no fixed abode.
Not every Member born to parents of below gentry status began life at the lower end of the social heap, of course, as some yeoman were so prosperous that they were virtually indistinguishable from the lesser gentry.
Just as the social complexion of the House widely varied, so too did the wealth of its Members. At any one time gentlemen with large landed fortunes rubbed shoulders in the House with those with scarcely a penny to their names. Many of the richest Members of the Commons were, of course, the sons of peers: Sir John Harington, eldest son of John, 1st Lord Harington, was heir to an estate reputedly worth between £5,000 and £7,000 per annum, a fortune ‘not much behind many earls’,
These very rich individuals were, of course, thin on the ground, yet even so it is clear that a large section of the Commons was extremely well heeled. Between fifty and sixty of the men who sat in this period were wealthy enough to buy shares in the newly created East India Company, and more than one member of the landed gentry with experience of serving in Parliament invested in several money-making ventures simultaneously. Sir Henry Neville of Billingbear, for instance, joined the New River Company in 1610, the French Company in 1611 and the East India Company in 1614. One individual was so well off that he proved capable of underwriting an entire commercial enterprise himself, for when the patentee responsible for building the New River ran out of funds in 1608 Hugh Myddelton, the Member for Denbigh Boroughs and a leading figure in the London Goldsmiths’ Company, took his place. Some of these wealthy individuals were, of course, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but by no means all: Sir Francis Crane, who seems to have come from minor gentry stock, began his career as a clerk, but he ended up as director of the lucrative Mortlake tapestry works, which he himself founded in 1619 with the support of the king.
Many of the Members who sat in this period were wealthy enough to take advantage of the Crown’s poverty, which famously manifested itself in the sale of honours. Between 1611 and 1642 no fewer than 109 of the 1,782 men returned to Parliament between 1604 and 1629 – an astonishing six per cent of the total – purchased a baronetcy. Of these a handful, like the duke of Buckingham’s crony Sir Francis Annesley, procured their honour at a hefty discount, but most were evidently prevailed upon to pay the asking price of £1,095. Knighthoods, too, were available to those with cash to spare. Among those Members who purchased the right to be dubbed was Sir Edward Dering, who paid £160 in 1619, plus an additional £43 in fees.
Although many Members were clearly well off, plenty of their colleagues were anything but financially secure. We have already seen that a small but significant minority of Members in every Parliament sought election to escape their creditors,
Education and the professions
Although we now have a great deal of information about many of the men who sat in the early seventeenth-century House of Commons, our knowledge of their education is necessarily patchy. Whereas the admissions records for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, for the Inns of Court and for several of England’s most ancient public schools have survived more or less intact, those for the Inns of Chancery and for many of the smaller grammar schools have not. We also possess only an incomplete picture of the arrangements made by Members’ fathers or guardians to have their charges educated abroad. We know, for instance, that eight of the men who went on to sit in the Commons during this period attended the well-known riding academy at Angers, in southern France,
There is every reason to suppose that most of the men who sat in the Commons during this period were highly educated. At least half attended the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, or both,
Foreign travel formed an important part of the education of many wealthy young gentlemen in the early modern period, so not surprisingly several of the men who went on to sit in the Commons under the early Stuarts had an extensive personal knowledge of the Continent. Indeed, about nine per cent of those who sat are known to have visited, and in some cases toured, mainland Europe as part of their education; the true figure is almost certainly much higher. Normally foreign travels complemented a man’s training at Oxford, Cambridge or the Inns of Court, but sometimes a stint abroad may actually have served as a substitute for a university education: Sir Henry Herbert, Sir John Jennyns and Sir Thomas Mansell are just three of the twenty or so individuals who seem to fall into this category. Of course, it was not just those who undertook what later became known as the Grand Tour who acquired a first-hand knowledge of the Continent before sitting in Parliament. Many future Members of the Commons spent time abroad in a professional capacity. Some did so as soldiers, others as merchants, like the London Haberdasher Martin Bond and the London Draper George Lowe, both of whom were based at Stade in northern Germany in the 1590s. Several men who went on to sit in Parliament served abroad in their youth as merchants’ factors, among them Sir Lionel Cranfield, Sir Arthur Ingram and Hugh Myddelton.
There was always a significant number of merchants with seats in the Commons, since commerce was vital to England’s prosperity. As the London lawyer Nicholas Fuller put it in 1610, merchants were ‘the legs we go upon’.
Precisely how many merchants sat at any one time is not always easy to say, as there are gaps in our knowledge in respect of some of the minor townsmen. Take the Hereford Member John Warden, who was returned in November 1610. As well as being a member of Hereford’s corporation, it seems likely that Warden was also a brewer, since his widow was thus described in the year after his death, but if so firm evidence is lacking. A further difficulty boils down to a problem of classification, since not everyone who engaged in trade was primarily a merchant. Sir Edward Hales of Woodchurch, Kent, grew hops on a commercial basis on his manor of Chart from the early 1620s, but it would probably be going too far to describe him as a merchant. The same might also be said of the Westminster resident William Man, whose principal source of income was probably his employment as rent collector for the Abbey of Westminster rather than the timber business he also ran. Members whose fathers were merchants were not necessarily merchants themselves. Charles Cockayne, who represented Reigate in 1628, was son and heir of the City merchant Alderman William Cockayne, but so far as we can tell he never engaged in commerce and was content to remain simply a member of the landed gentry.
Although there are difficulties in establishing exactly how many Members were merchants, the overall picture seems clear. Under Elizabeth their number steadily fell, from 17% for the first three parliaments of the reign (taken together) to 13% for the last three.
In 1621 the increase was almost certainly attributable to the fact that the Parliament met against the backdrop of one of the worst cloth-trade depressions in England’s history. Under such circumstances it seems likely that many merchants who might not otherwise have wished to do so entered Parliament. The reason for the increase in 1628 is harder to discern, but it probably reflected the recent emergence of an alliance between the City and the Commons. Prior to 1625, as Robert Brenner has shown, the Commons was largely hostile to London’s chartered companies, since many Members considered the latter’s trading privileges as little better than monopolies. The overwhelming majority of merchants in the Commons were drawn not from the City but from the outports, whose Members provided much of the impetus behind the free trade bills of 1604, 1605-6 and 1621.
It is difficult to be sure what impact the fluctuating number of merchant-Members had on the business of the Commons. However, the fact that so few merchant-Members sat in 1614 probably helps to explain why the House largely ignored a major restructuring of the cloth trade. Aside from a single debate held on 20 May, the Commons never debated the likely economic consequences of the recent suppression of the Merchant Adventurers’ charter nor the suitability of the new company under Alderman Cockayne that would soon take its place, preferring instead to focus its attentions on impositions. Conversely, the increase in the number of merchant-Members in 1628/9 may have helped fuel the House’s resentment of Tunnage and Poundage, particularly since one of the merchants who refused to pay this duty, John Rolle, was himself a Member of the Commons.
If merchant-Members were often thin on the ground, so too were the soldiers sitting in the Commons. Indeed, in each of the parliaments of this period the number of Members with military or naval commissions can easily be numbered on the fingers of two hands (see appendix vii). In 1621 there were only four – Sir Edward Cecil, Sir Henry Mervyn, Sir John Radcliffe and Sir Robert Sidney – and in 1628/9 just two (Thomas Brett and Sir John Chudleigh). In 1624 Sir George Chaworth claimed that the Commons contained ‘many captains of the Low Countries’, a fact which ‘must instantly engage us in a war’ with Spain,
The absence of serving soldiers and naval seamen from the Commons is not altogether surprising. Throughout most of this period England was at peace, and though a small number of troops were kept in pay in the Low Countries there was no standing army, and the Navy maintained only a skeleton force at sea. When England did finally go to war, in 1625, most men with military or naval commissions were too busy to consider serving in the Commons. It was only because he was between military employments that Francis Carew of Westminster was able to sit in 1626. During the parliaments of the later 1620s, the Navy’s spokesmen in the Commons were necessarily administrators like Sir John Coke and Sir Robert Pye rather than serving seamen, and even so such individuals were thin on the ground: Sir William Russell was so overworked as treasurer of the Navy in 1626 that he rarely found time to attend to his Commons duties, while Sir James Bagg was kept so busy in victualling the Navy’s ships at Plymouth in 1628 that although the third Caroline Parliament opened in February he did not take up his seat until May.
While the number of serving soldiers and seamen remained pitifully small, the number of Members with some form of military experience was somewhat higher. Some, like Sir John Scott, who represented Kent in 1604 and Maidstone in 1614, were former professional soldiers, while others, such as the Somerset squire Sir Maurice Berkeley, had merely served as a volunteer on a single expedition. Not surprisingly, the number of military veterans was at its highest during the first Jacobean Parliament, a result of the eighteen-year long Elizabethan war with Spain. Roughly nine per cent of the House’s intake in 1604 – forty-two Members – are known to have had some form of military service, and though death claimed one of these men in 1606, and the House of Lords another, four others with military experience entered the chamber in 1610.
Undoubtedly the most influential group of professionals in the Commons were the lawyers. It was they who helped lead the charge against monopolies in 1601, the Union in 1604 and 1606-7, and impositions in 1610 and 1614. Lawyers also played a key part in the revival of impeachment in 1621 and 1624, in opposing Buckingham in 1626, in defending the liberties of the subject against the arbitrary actions of the Crown in 1628 and in complaining against the continued levying of Tunnage and Poundage in 1629. So indispensable were they during the imposition debates of June 1610 that a separate register of their names was kept to ensure their attendance.
The lawyers had long formed an essential component of the Commons. During the fifteenth century their numbers had swollen dramatically, from around 15% of the House’s total membership in 1395 to 24% in 1491. In part this growth reflected an expansion in the legal profession, but it was also a function of the Crown’s attitude, which ‘had changed from mild hostility to active encouragement’.
In view of the essential part they played between 1604 and 1629, one might easily assume that the number of lawyer-Members under the early Stuarts remained at around the level reached in 1601. In point of fact, the period witnessed a gradual yet substantial contraction in the number of lawyer-Members. Indeed, one symptom of this marked decline, – the difficulty that many borough recorders experienced during the 1620s in securing a seat for themselves locally – has been noticed in a previous chapter.
The surprising collapse in lawyer numbers between 1604 and 1629 is most clearly illustrated in tabular form, although for lists of names readers are referred to appendix v. The figures below show the total number of lawyers who entered the House at each general election. Those admitted at by-elections are excluded, as are men like Edward Salter who, though trained as lawyers, are known to have abandoned their legal careers by the time they sat in Parliament.
Table 1
|
Parliament |
Seats available at start of the Parliament |
Barristers and trainee barristers |
Civil lawyers (including those not members of Doctors’ Commons) |
Attorneys, notaries public and scriveners |
Total number of lawyers |
Number of lawyers expressed as a percentage of the House |
|
1604-10 |
468 |
78 |
9 or 10 |
11 |
c.100 |
21% |
|
1614 |
471 |
77 |
6 |
7 |
90 |
19% |
|
1621 |
477 |
64 |
5 |
12 |
81 |
17% |
|
1624 |
481 |
69 |
3 |
5 |
77 |
16% |
|
1625 |
489 |
52 |
2 |
6 |
60 |
12.5% |
|
1626 |
489 |
66 or 67 |
2 |
10 or 11 |
c.78 |
16% |
|
1628-9 |
489 |
54 or 55 |
3 |
7 |
c.64 |
13% |
What lay behind this startling decrease? One possibility, of course, is that the number of lawyers was shrinking. In fact, much of the legal profession during this period was thriving: by 1600 there were, according to Sir Thomas Wilson, at least 2,000 barristers and just as many attorneys, not to mention an ‘infinite number’ of ‘solicitors and pettifoggers’.
Since only the civil lawyers belonged to a side of the profession that was dwindling, how can we account for the decline in lawyer representation in the Commons? One possible explanation is that lawyers grew increasingly unpopular with the electorate. Considerable hostility towards members of the legal profession certainly existed in the early seventeenth century, not least among many Members of the Commons, both past and present. In April 1604 the former Member Arthur Hall deplored the fact that the Commons was ‘swarming with mercenary lawyers, many of whom can talk and lie well’.
Another possible explanation for the decline in the number of lawyer-Members lies in the attitude of James I, who believed that lawyer opposition to impositions had been responsible for wrecking the 1614 assembly. In the proclamation issued ahead of the 1621 Parliament, James forbade the return of ‘curious and wrangling lawyers, who may seek reputation by stirring needless questions’. The lord chancellor, the former Sir Francis Bacon, was appalled, for in his earlier draft of this Proclamation he had suggested prohibiting the election only of those lawyers ‘of mean account and estimation’.
Since lawyers are unlikely to have declined in popularity among the electorate at large, and since there is no direct evidence from municipal records that James’s clumsy attempt to exclude them from membership had any impact on electoral behaviour, what then are we to make of the numerical decline of the lawyer-Members? In one or two cases the explanation may lie in a failure to prosecute the interests of constituents more vigorously. At Winchester in 1625, for example, the borough recorder, William Savage, who had represented the town in the previous two assemblies, was passed over in favour of a country gentleman, Sir Thomas Phelips, having failed to lay two bills before the 1624 Parliament as instructed. However, in general the most likely cause of the reduction in the number of lawyers was increased competition for Commons’ seats among the landed gentry, for as has been demonstrated in an earlier chapter, the number of contested elections rose significantly during this period. Another consideration, admittedly peculiar to 1628, may have been the failure of members of the legal profession to put themselves in the vanguard of the opposition to the Forced Loan. It is of course true that William Noye and John Selden, both of whom sat in 1628, acted as counsel to the Five Knights, whose prosecution for non-payment served as a test case for the legality of the Loan. Nevertheless, of the fifty-six Members of the 1628-9 Parliament known or suspected to have evaded payment only one – George Radcliffe – was a lawyer. The rest, with the exceptions of the merchants James Bunce, Christopher Clitherow, Edmund Day, Ignatius Jourdain and Henry Waller, were all members of the landed gentry, and of these twenty-three certainly suffered some form of imprisonment.
A dramatic decline in numbers was not the only change to overtake the legal profession in Parliament. During the first and second Jacobean assemblies the single largest group of common lawyers came from Lincoln’s Inn rather than from any of the other three Inns of Court. This is not altogether surprising, for as Wilfrid Prest has demonstrated, between 1590 and 1639 more men were called to the bar of Lincoln’s Inn than to the bars of any of the other Inns of Court.
Table 2
|
Parliament |
Lincoln’s Inn |
Middle Temple |
Gray’s Inn |
Inner Temple |
|
1604-10 |
30 |
25 |
19 |
17 |
|
1614 |
32 |
18 |
20 |
10 |
|
1621 |
17 |
22 |
14 |
17 |
|
1624 |
23 or 24 |
10 |
18 or 19 |
22 |
|
1625 |
17 |
13 |
7 |
18 |
|
1626 |
20 |
15 |
14 |
21 |
|
1628-9 |
21 |
12 |
8 |
19 |
No less difficult to understand is the fact that few of the lawyers who sat in the Commons were the product of Gray’s Inn. This institution admitted nearly twice as many entrants as any other house during this period, and prior to the 1620s it actually eclipsed Lincoln’s Inn in terms of bar calls.
Client groups
Many members of the peerage, as well as several bishops, enjoyed a certain amount of parliamentary patronage. Through landholding or office, noblemen were often able to exert pressure on nearby boroughs to return their own friends, kinsmen or clients to the Commons. This did not mean that a vast swathe of the lower House was in thrall to the upper chamber of Parliament, nor did it mean that men who owed their seats to a particular peer necessarily regarded themselves as primarily part of an aristocratic party or faction in the Commons. In a perceptive study of the parliamentary influence of Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham, R.W. Kenny has concluded that although Nottingham was head of the admiralty between 1585 and 1619 ‘there is almost nothing to suggest’ that the earl tried to create ‘anything like a coherent naval bloc’. Indeed, ‘it is perhaps anachronistic to suggest that it would even have occurred to him’. It is of course true, as Kenny concedes, that Nottingham used his influence with his clients in the Commons in 1604 to ensure the smooth passage of two bills of immediate concern to his own family – one concerning his daughter and the other his wife – since in both cases the bill committees concerned were packed with his friends and clients. However, as Kenny has also demonstrated, when Nottingham’s own licence for the sale of wines was attacked as a monopoly and included in the Commons’ list of grievances in 1606, none of his clients in the lower House offered ‘any defence or mitigation that the clerk or diarists thought worthy of notice’. From this silence Kenny has reasonably concluded that Nottingham ‘made no real effort to control the behaviour of even those members who owed every political success to his patronage’. Indeed, the most conspicuous feature of Nottingham’s group of supporters in the Commons ‘was that they were of an independent mind’.
Few members of the nobility, even those who held high office, were capable of obtaining seats for more than a handful of Members. Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk in 1614 is a case in point. Suffolk was not only lord chamberlain but also lord lieutenant of both Dorset and Cambridgeshire. He owned extensive estates, most notably in Wiltshire and Essex, and together with William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, has a right to be regarded as one of the chief architects of the 1614 Parliament. Yet so far as can be discerned, Suffolk managed to secure seats for only about fifteen of his clients, either by direct nomination or through the good offices of his brother Lord William Howard at Morpeth and his son Henry Howard at Derby.
Another equally striking case is that of the 3rd earl of Pembroke. J.K. Gruenfelder has described Pembroke as ‘the greatest electoral patron’ of the early seventeenth century because his nominees may have taken as many as ninety-eight seats between 1614 and 1628.
The peer with the largest personal following in the Commons during the 1620s was not the earl of Pembroke but the royal favourite, the duke of Buckingham. Buckingham has sometimes been written off as a parliamentary patron, partly because in 1626 he or his subordinates acted too late to issue his letters of nomination, but also because many of his nominees were rejected by the voters. In fact, Buckingham’s known or suspected clients were more than twice as numerous as Pembroke’s in 1625 and roughly equivalent in number to the earl’s in 1626. Compared with Pembroke’s fifteen or so clients in 1625 (one of whom was not elected until July), Buckingham had thirty-two or thirty-three of his own supporters in the House,[footnote] and in 1626 the duke’s personal following – about twenty-seven strong if the two Arminians Richard Dyott and Richard Spencer are excluded – was roughly the same as his rival’s.
Peers were not the only individuals to establish client groups in the Commons. In 1621 and 1624 Prince Charles, through the council erected in 1615-16 to manage his household and properties, acted as an electoral agent and created a small body of supporters in the Commons. In both parliaments the council succeeded in returning thirteen of its nominees, though this success rate, particularly in 1624, was lower than it wished.
Religion
Few aspects of the Commons’ composition were ultimately more important to relations between the king and his parliaments than that of religion. In theory at least every Member of the House was Protestant. Indeed, as we have seen, before being formally admitted to the House, each man was required to take the 1563 Oath of Supremacy, which acknowledged that the king rather than the Pope was the head of the English Church. However, since there were still some parts of the country, such as Lancashire and Worcestershire, that inclined to the old religion, many closet Catholics and Catholic sympathizers attained membership of the House. Precisely how many can never be known, since such individuals kept their religious preferences concealed from their fellow Members by outwardly conforming.
Contemporaries often assumed that men married to Catholics were themselves popishly inclined. In 1605, for instance, the bishop of Hereford had the Hereford Member Anthony Pembrugge removed from the bench on the grounds that his wife was a recusant. However, this assumption was not entirely justified. In 1624 Sir Nicholas Saunders, who sat in 1604-10 and 1626, was presented to the Commons by Surrey’s knights of the shire as a recusant officeholder on the grounds that ‘his wife is of a popish disposition’, but they added that Saunders himself was ‘not suspected any way to be popish’. That same year Sir James Perrot admitted to the Commons that his wife was a recusant, though he himself was one of the hottest Protestants in the House.
Although the exact number of Members who leaned towards Rome can never be ascertained, it is possible to gain some sense of the extent of Catholic infiltration of the Commons. Between 1563 and 1601 the number of avowed Catholics in the House tailed off dramatically as a result of the requirement that Members swear the Oath of Supremacy, but this was counterbalanced by an increase in the number of Catholics who outwardly conformed. Taken alongside those Members with strong Catholic affiliations, there were, at most, forty Catholic or crypto-Catholic Members sitting in 1601 – somewhat less than 10% of the whole House.
As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the fear of Catholic penetration of the Commons – heightened not only by the assassination of Henri IV but also by the defection to Rome in 1608 of the St. Albans Member Tobie Matthew – led the Commons to tighten its procedures, with the result that from 1610 Members were required to take the Oath of Allegiance as well as the Oath of Supremacy. In the short term at least this additional requirement seems to have made little impact on the number of Catholics and their sympathizers in the House, for there were just as many in 1614 as there had been in 1604-10. Among the most conspicuous were Henry Britton, who owed his nomination for Christchurch to the Catholic Lord Arundell of Wardour, and whose family was certainly Catholic (his father was a notorious recusant and his sister was in an Augustinian convent); Sir Thomas Gerrard, 1st bt. (Lancashire), who had been in trouble in 1592 for keeping a Catholic schoolmaster and whose wife was a devout Catholic; Rowland Lacon (Much Wenlock), who never held public office (presumably because of his religious sympathies) and whose father was certainly a Romanist; Sir Anthony Mayney (Cirencester), whom Joseph Mead described in 1622 as ‘a great Papist’ and whose friends included the leading Catholic peer John Paulet, 4th marquess of Winchester;
Not until 1624 did the Catholics in the House begin to dwindle. Parliament that year met in an atmosphere of heightened hostility towards Catholics, both at home and abroad, and in such a climate it is not surprising that fewer Members sympathetic to the old religion than before – perhaps no more than eighteen – secured admission to the Commons. Following the outbreak of war with Spain in 1625, the number of Members with known or suspected Catholic sympathies evidently declined still further, presumably as a result of widespread anti-Catholicism: in each of the parliaments of 1625 and 1626 there were perhaps no more than fifteen such individuals,
Although there was always a small number of Catholic-leaning Members in the Commons, the vast majority of the House’s membership was Protestant. However, Protestant belief in early seventeenth-century England spanned an increasingly wide spectrum. Prior to the 1620s the chief division among English Protestants was between those who believed that the Elizabethan Church settlement was capable of improvement and those who did not. The main cause of complaint was that many of the rites and ceremonies that had been practised in the Church prior to the Reformation still remained, but some also considered the political structures of the Church unsatisfactory and wished to replace the bishops with a presbyterian form of government. A few even regarded the established Church as so flawed that they wished to separate from it entirely. Advocates of further reform of the Church were dubbed ‘puritans’ , but those so labelled often disliked this term, considering it a form of abuse, for not everyone who wished to purify the Church of its popish ceremonies was happy to be associated with presbyterianism, let alone separatism. During the 1620s the term ‘puritan’ gained an additional meaning in the hands of the Arminian cleric Richard Montagu, who applied it to all doctrinal Calvinists in the hope of tarring them with the brush of heterodoxy. In 1626 the Commons not unreasonably protested at this gross deception, claiming that Montagu ‘does draw together in one collective name of puritans the greatest part of the king’s true subjects’.
Under the early Stuarts the House of Commons contained many of these would-be church reformers, among them the London Member Nicholas Fuller, whose godly proclivities did not prevent him from owning a half-share in a Smithfield inn, and Samuel More, who shipped his four children off to New England in the Mayflower (the youngest aged just six) after he discovered that his wife was an adulterer. However, precisely how many puritans there were in Parliament at any one time rather depends, as Conrad Russell observed, on what meaning we give this elastic term.
One way of measuring the number of puritans in the Commons at any one time, suggested by Russell, is to see whether the House sat on Ascension Day. Those Members who thought that Ascension Day was holy would not wish to do so, whereas puritans, who considered it superstitious to imbue a particular day with holiness, were likely to favour sitting as normal.
This finding is highly significant, since James sometimes ascribed his parliamentary difficulties to puritan Members of the Commons. In a speech delivered to the judges in Star Chamber in June 1616, for instance, James complained of those gentlemen whose ‘puritanical itching after popularity’ had caused them to be ‘too bold of late in the lower House of Parliament’.
Although James was mistaken in equating puritanism with opposition, this does not mean that the religious complexion of the Commons played no part in the early Stuarts’ difficulties with their parliaments. Most Protestant Englishmen subscribed to the view that the doctrine of the English Church was essentially Calvinist. At the heart of Calvinist teaching lay the doctrine of predestination, which stated that man’s salvation lay not in faith or good works but in the will of God alone. However, from the 1590s onwards this Calvinist consensus came under attack from a number of churchmen, who argued that all men were potentially capable of salvation. By the mid 1620s these anti-Calvinists, dubbed Arminians by their opponents, were not only influential on the bench of bishops but also in royal circles. Indeed, it has been argued that the accession of Charles I in 1625 occasioned ‘the overthrow of Calvinism’ as Charles, aided and abetted by the duke of Buckingham, not only refused to condemn Arminianism but also proceeded to advance its exponents.
Few Members of the Commons were anti-Calvinists, which is not altogether surprising, as lay Arminians were thin on the ground. Indeed, Nicholas Tyacke has identified only two ‘thoroughgoing Arminians’ in the House during the 1620s, these being the Staffordshire lawyer Richard Dyott and the Northamptonshire squire Richard Spencer, a younger son of the 1st Lord Spencer. He has also noted six other probable supporters of Arminianism, namely Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Robert Killigrew, Sir Thomas Lake, Nicholas Ferrar, Edward Dowse, and Christopher Brooke. Of these perhaps only Lake, as clear an example of a crypto-Catholic as one can find, seems questionable.
Royal support for the Arminians cost the king and his favourite an enormous amount of goodwill in the Commons, since many Members regarded anti-Calvinists as little better than closet Catholics. Indeed, in 1628 the Northampton Member Christopher Sherland declared that the Arminians ‘run in a string with the papists’.